The phone call is long overdue. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pampered as never before by Donald Trump, will have to deal with a Joe Biden much less in a hurry to display the same proximity and, beyond that, to get involved in the thorny Israeli-Palestinian issue.
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If “Bibi” pretends to minimize this wait of three weeks since the entry into office of the new president of the United States, the head of the international branch of his party, the Likud, decided on Wednesday to challenge him directly.
“Perhaps the time has finally come to call on the leader of Israel, America’s closest ally? Danny Danon said in a tweet. And to drive the point home, he provided Joe Biden with a phone number to reach his prime minister.
On the American side too, Nikki Haley, former ambassador to the United Nations under Donald Trump, accused the Biden government of “snubbing” a “friend like Israel” while making “friend-friend” with “an enemy like Iran”.
In fact, Benjamin Netanyahu, in the midst of the campaign for his political survival, had been used by the former Republican president to receive pre-election nudges. But the Democrat has little to gain by doing the same before the Israeli legislative elections on March 23.
Especially since if Donald Trump wanted to satisfy his evangelical Christian base very attached to the defense of Israel, Joe Biden risks him quickly to displease this key ally by reverting to the agreement on Iranian nuclear power that the Israeli government has failed. stopped denouncing.
“We are obviously in a completely different situation,” said Jeremy Ben Ami, president of the progressive American Jewish organization J Street. If he assures that Joe Biden has “an old and good personal relationship” with Israel, he also underlines that his team was often already in charge between 2009 and 2017 under Barack Obama, whose ties were more strained.
“President Obama had made resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a foreign policy priority from the start of his mandate, without much success,” adds Michele Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank.
Beyond personal relationships, Washington therefore wants to take its time.
” Hard reality “
Where Donald Trump promised from the outset, in 2017, to find the “ultimate agreement” between Israel and the Palestinians, without ever reaching it, the Biden administration is showing its caution.
The new head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken certainly assured that the “two-state solution” was the only viable one, thus reviving the international consensus battered by the Republican billionaire.
But this “solution” has “become impossible to implement”, believes Michele Dunne, “but neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians have yet presented an alternative”.
“The harsh reality is that we are very far from a breakthrough for peace and a final resolution” with “the creation of a Palestinian state,” Antony Blinken seemed to agree Monday on CNN.
Showing very modest ambitions, he called on the two camps not to take any “unilateral decision that would further erode the prospects for peace”. No question, in the immediate future, of evoking a return to the negotiating table.
For Jeremy Ben Ami, the United States should confine itself for the moment to “keeping the possibility of negotiations alive, rather than presenting a major new initiative”.
Evidence of some embarrassment, the Biden administration has yet to clarify its position on the long list of pro-Israel unilateral decisions taken by Donald Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The new government has confirmed that it will maintain the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, which the United States will continue to regard as the capital of the Hebrew state despite international protests.
Conversely, he promised to reopen the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington, and to restore aid to Palestinians cut off in recent years.
But on other matters, he always seems to be looking for a balance.
Antony Blinken refused to comment definitively on the recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights annexed in 1981. And he did not comment on Mike Pompeo’s decision not to judge the Israeli settlements in the West Bank contrary to the international law.
“Under the Trump administration, the Israelis were given a green light to do whatever they wanted in the West Bank and move forward with the annexation” of the settlements, “we hope they will be given a red light most quickly possible, ”says Jeremy Ben Ami.